Updated 63 Days ago
It is not uncommon for the smell of grilled hamburgers and hot dogs to waft down Brentwood Bloulevard as bar owners Rick and Donna Wideman fire up a BBQ pit outside the front doors and greet partons as they make their way in the doors of the Double D Lounge in Brentwood. The bar has long been a haunt on the busy artery running from Manchester to Clayton roads, and is not only an inviting happy hour spot but a place that has designated barstools as well.
Double D is a dive bar of the highest of sanctioned degrees. Cheap sips, a pool table, and the same metal and cushion chairs you may recognize from fine bowling establishments. But what draws the beautiful people in as they leave the proper Clayton bars isn't the easy to clean furniture - it's the karaoke and the come as you are atmosphere that keeps people of all ilks coming back.
Donna and Rick have owned and operated the bar for more than twenty years and you will see them serving drinks and talking to regulars as well as newbies every night. They aren't a corner bar to leave their community hanging in a pinch either. The bar is often playing host to fundraisers and during those miserable, widespread power outages a few summers ago they sent out an open invitation for families to stop in for free water and food. That friendliness is evident even in a smoke filled room filled with wine, cheap perfume, and stumbling karaoke performances. I recommend the Double D for a quiet night begging for a quick, relaxed drink, a decompression stop after a night at one of those snotty spots, or for a cheap happy hour with friends who just don't give a damn and are just glad ya came.
Double D is a great pre-evening out for cheap and a very popular post weekend happy hour haunt. The bar is open Monday through Saturday 4pm to 1:30am and is located at the corner of Bridgeport and Brentwood Boulevard. Though their drinks aren't of the price range that insists on a happy hour to draw a crowd, they have happy hour specials from 4pm until 7pm.
I'm not sure I've ever escaped there without ending up on the karaoke stage. Always a sign that the libations are well-served.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.